> Was this due to a sudden increase in reactor construction? Mild delay in a mine opening. A sudden increase in reactor construction would be much worse. > Th

> Was this due to a sudden increase in reactor construction? Mild delay in a mine opening. A sudden increase in reactor construction would be much worse. > This is a distinct advantage over wind and solar that do not directly produce thermal energy and have to be converted from electricity to thermal energy. CSP exists and is going down in price rapidly. > Sulfuric acid is widely used for plenty of things like fertilizer production, hydrocarbon refining, and car batteries. An 8x increase in nuclear power wouldn't substantially affect the markets for these resources 1kg of Uranium from inkai or husab uses 50-100kg of sulfuric acid. And this is high grade compared to the 600,000 tonnes per year you are proposing using. Doubling world sulfuric acid production is about the right magnitude. > uranium seawater extraction has been successfully performed Make up your mind about what is possible and what is impossible. If doing it once to publish a paper and then pencilling out the costs of raw materials counts then we can all just use AlS batteries and go home. > This is not how seawater extraction works. The same mass of adsorbent won't collect larger quantities of other elements. The 6 grams of uranium collected per kilogram of adsorbent doesn't turn into a 6 kilograms of material per Kg of adsorbent for a material that's 1000x as concentrated in the ocean. It will fill up faster for a more concentrated element, but you're still retrieving similar amounts of material for the same amount of adsorbent. You have to make 1000x as many trips to collect 1000x as much material, regardless of concentration. > The cost of this extraction is entirely comprised of deploying and retrieving the adsorbent material - letting a buoy sit in the ocean for 2 months instead of 1 week costs nothing. This is why seawater extraction is prohibitively expensive for most applications, uranium's incredible energy density is what makes it a viable application. Natural Uranium in a burner reactor is not very energy dense in the scheme of things. Much higher than coal, but about the same power output as a similar mass of silicon in a photovoltaic cell (but at 75% CF for 6 years rather than ~15-25% for 30-50). At ~3g/kg the uranium only has about 10x as much energy as you'd get by burning the polymer or 5x in the current nuclear fleet (wonder how much it takes to make?). There goes the much vaunted EROI unless you get quite a few reuses (hint: you only get a few). Also what I said is exactly how sea mining works. Please at least try to understand these technologies before pushing them. You get more vanadium than Uranium in any realistic use case https://www.osti.gov/pages/biblio/1234341 https://www.osti.gov/pages/biblio/1234341 The longer you leave it, the more Uranium gets displaced by Vanadium. At 2 months you get 5x as much. 1kg of natural uranium has a power output of about 1-2kW for 6 years and then it's gone. 1kg of vanadium can store 350-650Wh. Such a simple plan with so few completely deal breaking oversights compared to building sodium ion factories which is already happening and building more pumped hydro which we know how to do.